INTRODUCTION
Marketing professionals help companies and clients understand their target audience and accomplish business goals by following a sales funnel. The top of the funnel is the Awareness Stage, which consists of leads, a broad group of people who are unaware or have little familiarity with a company and its products. Companies reach out to specific leads because they show important characteristics that match those of their ideal customer. The goal is to convert those leads into customers as they become increasingly aware of their goods and services.
Sales funnels are not just for marketers. It might be silly to think that a sales funnel can relate to promoting your expert witness practice, but it resonates more than you think it would. Any business selling goods or services, including expert witnesses, needs to connect with its target audience. Building those connections is not easy to achieve unless you have been a practicing expert witness for years. In brief, this blog will define reach and explain why it is vital for expert witnesses and their digital marketing efforts.
“REACH” FOR EXPERT WITNESSES
The Awareness Stage is when target audiences first discover a service, company, or person they might need. As an expert witness, expanding your audience is the key to increasing your opportunities. To measure the Awareness Stage of your business, “reach” is the metric to use.
What is “Reach”?
Hootsuite states, “On social media, reach refers to the number of users that saw your content, i.e., how many different people it reached.” For example, if I upload a video tutorial on Instagram, I can see that 700 accounts looked at the post. To clarify, this differs from impressions, defined as the number of times the content appears on a user’s screen. Reach counts users and impressions measure total, cumulative views. In this blog, we will only focus on the former. The number of eyes on your material is far more important than the number of times those same eyes look at your content, like articles, blogs, and videos.
When you begin to promote your practice, your primary goal is to access as many relevant audience members as possible. It is not enough to just freely post material for the sake of posting. Your content must have intention, purpose, and relatability. It is the primary way to cement connections and partnerships. Unless a customer is in dire need of a certain product or service, it is rare for a lead to quickly purchase anything from a company or person they barely know.
So, reach helps you see how many people are interested in you and your practice. The Awareness Stage is where you begin planting and nurturing the seeds toward the ultimate goal, retention.
Why Should Expert Witnesses Prioritize “Reach”?
The initial goal for any entrepreneur or business is to amass as many people as possible to increase their chances of a “sale.” The same can be said for expert witnesses. Getting the attention of those you are seeking can boost your chances of testifying in court for an attorney and their client.
Knowing how many users in your target audience are encountering your content can help you maintain or refine your strategy. For example, say your reach results are insufficient. Hashtags are a great way to expand your audience. It invites users who do not follow you to see your content if the hashtag they click is in your post. This only works if the social media account you are posting from is public.
To track reach on social media, like Facebook, LinkedIn, X, and more, Hootsuite provides information about platform-specific analytics tools . Experts.com offers analytic reporting services as well! You can view audience engagement on your profile page, CV, articles, videos, books, and other content. Ultimately, if you are interested in understanding how well your digital content performs, it’s crucial to familiarize yourself with these tools.
CONTENT IDEAS FOR “REACH”
While people can discover you and your business by searching for your website (an absolute MUST-HAVE for expert witnesses), you still need to put in the effort to aggregate potential clients. Below are some content ideas to help you promote your practice to attorneys and like-minded experts.
Organic Social Media Posts
When you post organically, it stems from either your personal or business social media accounts without paying for sponsorships. You share what you want to share on your own volition! There are a multitude of topics and ideas to to bring to your followers about your work and experience, like notable accomplishments, interviews, polls, and discussion posts. Overall, generating content that can help the audience relate to you will increasingly pique their interest in you and your business.
Blogs
Writing blogs or contributing to articles is another method of showcasing your knowledge to your following. It further cements your credibility as an expert in your field when you opine on industry news, collaborate with other similar experts, or produce your own blog post ideas. Blogsites like WordPress help you use search engine marketing with step-by-step processes to optimize your content. Lastly, you can insert links to gather traffic to your website or other pages you want your audience to visit. With this in mind, you can simultaneously share your knowledge while gaining potential clients. They just need to know who you are and what you do first.
CONCLUSION
In sum, a marketing sales funnel is a useful tool for expert witnesses wanting to track and promote their practice. What you put into your digital marketing efforts is exactly what you will get from it. Lastly, trying is the first step in accessing your desired audience. Stay tuned for the next blog, which covers Engagement and the Interest Stage.
